Wednesday, July 15, 2009

It recently came to The Racquetball Blog's attention that racquetball is sadly underrepresented on Wikipedia. Given how often web searches, if not direct Wikipedia searches, are the first line of inquiry for many people these days racquetball should have a better presence there.

Thus, the crack research team at The Racquetball Blog has been improving the wiki racquetball entry and improving or creating related entries on prominent racquetball players, including Cliff Swain, Sudsy Monchik, Kane Waselenchuk and Jack Huczek.

Some of you might be thinking "hey, those are all guys! what about the gals?" The hitch for writing pieces about women racquetball players is there's no archive of information about them to refer to regarding their pro careers as there is with for the men on the IRT Historical Archive maintained by Todd Boss.

Hence, we can tell you that Swain is the winningest male racquetball player, because we can refer to the data archive to back up that claim. But we can't tell you that Lynn Adams is the winningest female racquetball player, although that's what the records we've gathered together here at TRB HQ indicate, because there's no source that we can point at to back up that claim. You kinda have to take our word for it, and that's really not good enough.

Racquetball organizations have been poor at keeping track of their sport's history. As nice as Boss's IRT archive is he admits it's incomplete, but it is remarkably complete, which is a testament to Boss's perseverance in tracking down all the records.

We've been trying to do the same thing for the women's pro tour over the last few months by gathering all the past records we can. But it's not easy, and begs the question why do we (and Boss, for that matter) need to do this? Why haven't the associations kept up on this?

Ignoring past events is akin to saying that they didn't matter. But that could be extended to say the current events don't matter. That may be harsh, but if you're going to forget about today's event in a couple of years, why wait? Let's just ignore it now.

It's the sort of thing someone outside of racquetball - a potential sponsor, say - might ask upon finding out that an organization doesn't keep track of its history.

Thus, we encourage you to not just remember the past, but keep records of it! Because memories are fallible, and we can't make a web link to them - at least not yet.

Thanks. We have created wiki pages for some of the players: Carson, Huczek and Waselenchuk, as well as added on to Swain's and Monchik's pages (Monchik's was only 3 short sentences). Haven't done one for Mannino - yet - or any of the women players, although there is a page for Heather McKay mainly about her squash career.